This presentation problematizes the long-assumed sectarian camps of the early modern Middle East (i.e. Sunni Ottomans vs. Shiite Safavids) from an often-neglected perspective, the lens of the Qizilbash (“red heads” in Turkish due to a crimson headpiece symbolizing the adherents’ allegiance to the Shiite Imams) and their authority as a convincing force in dictating the religious and political rhetoric of the era. While the Ottoman-Safavid relationship has been the topic of many academic works in Turkish, Iranian, and Western literatures; the Qizilbash have constantly been depicted as either the passive receivers of Safavid propaganda due to their alleged lack of proper Islamization and an archaic phenomenon with no relevance to the understanding of the early modern era, or as the subjects of a continuous Ottoman persecution. I, however, argue that as a unique population caught in between the power play of these two mighty Muslim empires the Qizilbash acted as a source of authority, dictating shifting notions of identity and policy via simple conversions and reconversions, and acts of tax evasion, migration, and rebellions. My approach synthesizing Ottoman, Safavid, and European primary sources that are rarely used in combination reveals the agency of the Qizilbash as an alternative “borderland authority” at shaping not only the nature of the relationship between the Ottoman and Safavid courts between the 1460s and 1630s, but also at directly influencing the formation and development of sectarian identities at both state and individual levels in the early modern era between Ottoman Sunnism, Safavid Shiism, and everything in between.